Timestamps in static libraries

[perryh at pluto.rain.com]

Erik Cederstrand <erik at cederstrand.dk> wrote:

> It seems I can at least normalize the .a files using something
> like the following to weed out timestamps and uid/gid:
>
> % ar -x /usr/lib/libfetch.a
> % chown 0:0 *
> % touch -t 197001010000 *
> % ar -r libfetch.a `ar -t /usr/lib/libfetch.a`
>
> ... Unfortunately it seems there's still a creation time of the
> archive itself that I cant alter using the above, so the md5 sums
> still don't match:
>
> % diff mod.strings orig.strings
> 2c2
> < /               1286312209  0     0     0       958       `
> ---
> > /               1269146263  0     0     0       958       `

Any particular reason to recollect them into an archive, if the
point is just to check md5 signatures?  I'm pretty sure collecting
them with tar instead will avoid this problem.